President Obama is proud of his bailout of General Motors. Thats good, because, if he wins a second term, he is probably going to have to bail GM out again. The company is once again losing market share, and it seems unable to develop products that are truly competitive in the U.S. market.

Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized

Pensions have been a noose around GMs neck for years, but the company is tying to address it. In June, GM said it will offer 42,000 white-collar retirees in the U.S. a lump-sum payment in lieu of their monthly pension check and will transfer pension responsibility for 76,000 others to a group annuity plan managed by Prudential Insurance. The company has yet to announce the results of the offer.

I think the government is going to do the same thing I did with my GM stock a couple of years ago.

And I think it was part of the plan all along. Basically they will be giving the remainder of the company to the union. I believe the corporation still has value such as real estate, patents, and other items that can be salvaged for the benefit of the union and it's sponsors.

We are watching a great american corporation being cannibalized by looters right before our eyes.

9
posted on 08/16/2012 4:13:39 PM PDT
by oldbrowser
(As long as Obama's records are sealed, any discussion of Romney's past is off limits.)

GM died as a company 35 years ago ~ from that time onward about all they manufactured were the body shells for several cars and three types of SUVs. The parts were made by others towards the end.

The management, with the Board of Director's approval, was gutting the company and getting the last penny out of any productive capacity, but it wasn't being added to in any meaningful way.

Finally, it was a marketing division ~ for hire ~ by foreign auto makers.

The proper termination would have involved a sale of the assets and a total dissolution of every aspect of the corporation, right down to busting up the concrete in the parking lots for use in road building projects elsewhere.

Bond holders would still have been shorted because there simply wasn't enough to cover the debt.

The next bankruptcy is the end of the road. No more GM. And yet UAW will probably be sued by everybody and his brother over that multibillion dollar payoff they got.

They'll probably lose that too having obtained it under false pretenses.

GM, Solyndra, high speed rail, etc. All of Obama’s spending is to pad pockets. None of the projects are really planned to succeed. He probably wants them to fail. All part of what has to happen to lead to the big “transformation” of America.

He has to destroy the country before he can transform it. Obama and all of his buddies should be swinging from the yardarm.

you ever work in an engine plant? most of them are assembly operations. typical of the Big Three they got into contracting out rods, caps, crankshafts, blocks, etc.

"PARTS".

decades ago. I worked on a line that made PARTS for all the Big Three. transmissions are different. for a very long time the Big Tree made their own transmissions, then gradually phased out of that. even Ford gave up machine screws and began buying them on the world market. I grew up about 3 miles from that factory. today the blocks are rough cast in Brazil and Argentina ~ since they are the world's low cost producer AND they seem to have no clean air laws so you can just blow dust all the time.

BTW, ICBMs started coming on line in the 1960s ~ that was JFK's argument ~ that Eisenhower had allowed a missile gap to happen and we were dreadfully behind the USSR.

At that time there were still several transmission plants in Indianapolis. Chrysler, Allison, Ford ~ still all there and smokin' day and night, and then gradually through the 1970s and 1980s their operations were minimized, work farmed out to newer, smaller, more automated plants, and finally just terminated or REMOVED entirely from building devices used in cars.

Today those plants are targets for ICBMs, just like they were 30 and 40 years ago. More recently - June 2007 in fact GM announced that it was selling Allison Transmission to private equity firms. Still, it'd been a good 25 years since they'd made anything other than top of the line heavy duty commercial transmissions ~ with what looks like a worldwide lock on bus transmissions. They quit making anything for automobiles ages back.

BTW, GM had built a new facility in Indianapolis for transmissions ~ but in the end there were only 2500 employees there. Used to be FAR MORE employees.

American manufacturing has shifted, in general, to top end stuff ~ with a lot more mechanization, automation, computerization and robotics than factories making similar products in other countries. We still have the stuff, but we don't make the more labor intensive small stuff, and we don't need to hire on the employees like the old days.

General Motors was gutted by its management and its value dissipated in dividends.

Just like to note for your information that final point of assembly is not where everything is made. The old Indianapolis International Harvester facility is still up and able to run blocks and build engines ~ for whatever you want ~ and they had what was called an automated line to build just about every part of a transmission except the case ~ but most of that facility was designed for medium and large V8 truck engines.

Still, during peak operations they contracted with the Big 3 to manufacture PARTS for every part of the drivetrain ~ but the only finished product counts you got out of that plant were ENGINES PRODUCED

Along the way I do believe I visited virtually every major manufacturing facility in Central Indiana and worked in some. The GM question focused on what happened to the company ~ and not it's assets ~ but the company, and the company was busy converting every asset it had into cash to distribute. Eventually (and I think "eventually" was something like 2009) they'd had to dissolve the company and sell most of their industrial base for the value of the land, steel, and reprocessed used brick facades.

Go ahead. Do whatever you want. I have dozens of first cousins ~ and virtually all of them spent years in the automotive manufacturing industry. Those still working are employed by Japanese parts companies. News gets out.

During the first GM bankruptcy there was a post comparing the bailout to what happened to British Leyland. The government saved the company only to later see it collapse anyway. The post said this is likely what would happen to GM as well.

Depends on whether you are talking about heavy duty commercial grade products or the light weight items for use in passenger cars.

Even then, the part's manufacturing is of greater importance than the assembly ~ and what you are giving out are assembly statistics. That's just a shell of the real activity of basic manufacturing parts which can be taking place in Korea, Japan, China, India, MExico ~ and you'd never know it.

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